• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
• /
• v.46 no.2
• /
• pp.66.1-66.1
• /
• 2021

Extinction curves observed toward individual Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) usually show a steep rise toward Far-Ultraviolet (FUV) wavelengths and can be described by the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC)-like dust model. This feature suggests the dominance of small dust grains of size a < 0.1 ㎛ in the local environment of AGN, but the origin of such small grains is unclear. In this paper, we aim to explain this observed feature by applying the RAdiative Torque Disruption (RATD) to model the extinction of AGN radiation from FUV to Mid-Infrared (MIR) wavelengths. We find that in the intense radiation field of AGN, large composite grains of size a > 0.1 ㎛ are significantly disrupted to smaller sizes by RATD up to dRATD > 100 pc in the polar direction and dRATD ~ 10 pc in the torus region. Consequently, optical-MIR extinction decreases, whereas FUV-near-Ultraviolet extinction increases, producing a steep far-UV rise extinction curve. The resulting total-to selective visual extinction ratio thus significantly drops to RV < 3.1 with decreasing distances to AGN center due to the enhancement of small grains. The dependence of RV with the efficiency of RATD will help us to study the dust properties in the AGN environment via photometric observations. In addition, we suggest that the combination of the strength between RATD and other dust destruction mechanisms that are responsible for destroying very small grains of a <0.05 ㎛ is the key for explaining the dichotomy observed "SMC" and "gray" extinction curve toward many AGN.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
• /
• v.44 no.2
• /
• pp.49.2-49.2
• /
• 2019

We present results from our long-term observing campaign, using the NASA IRTF at Maunakea, to obtain 2 - 4 ㎛ spectra of 118 red point sources in the line of sight to the Galactic Center (GC). Our sample is largely composed of point sources selected from near- and mid-infrared photometry, but also includes a number of massive young stellar objects. Many of these sources show high foreground extinction as shown by deep 3.4 ㎛ aliphatic hydrocarbon absorption feature, which is a characteristic of the diffuse ISM and comes from the long line of sight through the diffuse medium toward the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ), the central 300 pc region of the GC. The deep 3.1 ㎛ H₂O ice absorption band coming from the local, dense material in the GC CMZ suggests that most sources are likely located in the GC CMZ. A few of these sources show weak CCH₃OH ice absorption at 3.535 ㎛, which can provide a strong constraint on the CCH₃OH ice formation in the unique environment of the CMZ. From the best-fitting models, the optical depths of these features are determined and used to generate a well-rounded view of the ice composition across the GC CMZ and the spectral characteristics of massive YSOs in the GC.

• Korean Journal of Optics and Photonics
• /
• v.29 no.3
• /
• pp.110-118
• /
• 2018

We have designed a mid-infrared optical system for an airborne electro-optical targeting system. The mid-IR optical system is a dual-field-of-view (FOV) optics for an airborne electro-optical targeting system. The optics consists of a beam-reducer, a zoom lens group, a relay lens group, a cold stop conjugation optics, and an IR detector. The IR detector is an f/5.3 cooled detector with a resolution of $1280{\times}1024$ square pixels, with a pixel size of $15{\times}15{\mu}m$. The optics provides two stepwise FOVs ($1.50^{\circ}{\times}1.20^{\circ}$ and $5.40^{\circ}{\times}4.23^{\circ}$) by the insertion of two lenses into the zoom lens group. The IR optical system was designed in such a way that the working f-number (f/5.3) of the cold stop internally provided by the IR detector is maintained over the entire FOV when changing the zoom. We performed two analyses to investigate thermal effects on the image quality: athermalization analysis and Narcissus analysis. Athermalization analysis investigated the image focus shift and residual high-order wavefront aberrations as the working temperature changes from $-55^{\circ}C$ to $50^{\circ}C$. We first identified the best compensator for the thermal focus drift, using the Zernike polynomial decomposition method. With the selected compensator, the optics was shown to maintain the on-axis MTF at the Nyquist frequency of the detector over 10%, throughout the temperature range. Narcissus analysis investigated the existence of the thermal ghost images of the cold detector formed by the optics itself, which is quantified by the Narcissus Induced Temperature Difference (NITD). The reported design was shown to have an NITD of less than $1.5^{\circ}C$.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.29 no.2
• /
• pp.209-218
• /
• 2013

The Sonoran Desert, which is located in North America, has been frequently used for vicarious calibration of many optical sensors in satellites. Although the desert area has good conditions for vicarious calibration (e.g. high reflectance, little vegetation, large area, low precipitation), its adjacency to the sea and large variability in atmospheric water vapor are the disadvantages for vicarious calibration. For vicarious calibration using top-of-atmospheric (TOA) reflectance, the atmospheric variability brings about degraded precision in vicarious calibration results. In this paper, the location with the smallest radiometric variability in TOA reflectance is sought by using 12-year Landsat 5 data, and corrected the TOA reflectance for bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) which is another major source of variability in TOA reflectance. Experiments show that the mid-western part of the Sonoran Desert has the smallest variability collectively for visible and near-infrared bands, and the variability from the sunarget-sensor geometry can be reduced by the BRDF correction for the visible bands, but not sufficiently for the infrared bands.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
• /
• v.35 no.3
• /
• pp.201-210
• /
• 2018

The characterization of detectors installed in space- and ground-based instruments is important to evaluate the system performance. We report the development of a detector performance test system for astronomical applications using the Andor iKon M CCD camera. The performance test system consists of a light source, monochromator, integrating sphere, and power meters. We adopted the Czerny-Tuner monochromator with three ruled gratings and one mirror, which covers a spectral range of 200-9,000 nm with a spectral resolution of ~1 nm in the visible region. Various detector characteristics, such as the quantum efficiency, sensitivity, and noise, can be measured in wide wavelength ranges from the visible to mid-infrared regions. We evaluated the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI) detector performance test system by using the performance verification of the Andor iKon-M CCD camera. The test procedure includes measurements of the conversion gain ($2.86e^-/ADU$), full well capacity ($130K\;e^-$), nonlinearity, and pixel defects. We also estimated the read noise, dark current, and quantum efficiency as a function of the temperature. The lowest measured read noise is $12e^-$. The dark current at 223 K was determined to be $7e^-/s/pix$ and its doubling temperature is $5.3^{\circ}C{\pm}0.2^{\circ}C$ at an activation energy of 0.6 eV. The maximum quantum efficiency at 223 K was estimated to be $93%{\pm}2%$. We proved that the quantum efficiency is sensitive to the operating temperature. It varies up to 5 % in the visible region, while the variation increases to 30 % in the near-infrared region. Based on the comparison of our results with the test report by the vendor, we conclude that our performance test results are consistent with those from the vendor considering the test environment. We also confirmed that the KASI detector performance test system is reliable and our measurement method and analysis are accurate.

• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
• /
• v.28 no.3
• /
• pp.41-48
• /
• 2019

In modern-war campaign, precision-guided missiles are dominantly used to minimize the collateral damage. Imaging infrared seekers are widely applied for the precise guidance. Due to the high cost of the infrared detector, the cost for the one-shot weapon's test is a burden for the development. To reduce the test cost, a simulation method including imagery tracking is required, which is so-called integrated-flight simulation(IFS). The synthetic image generation(SIG)-based simulation method is typically used, which however cannot represent various environmental and target conditions. In this paper, a new IFS method is proposed using on-sight measured image to overcome the limitations of the SIG-based IFS(SIIFS). The target image acquired at the launching sight has been used only for checking the performance criteria of the image tracker and has not been tried for IFS since it has low resolution and little information. The study described in this paper, however, shows that the on-sight image-based IFS can predict the pre- and mid-course flight performance quite similarly and is very useful for the flight test analysis.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
• /
• v.21 no.6
• /
• pp.411-416
• /
• 2020

An optical arrangement has been set inside a photo-spectrometer to measure the reflectance of IR optics materials in mid IR range. The optical arrangement consists of equally spaced 4 gold coated full reflecting mirrors with the incidence angle of 45°. Baseline beam intensity I_B has been measured while the beam proceeds through the 4 mirrors. Reflectance of a mirror has been estimated from the I_B. And the beam intensity I_S with the specimen in the optical path has been measured with the 4th mirror replaced with the specimen. Reflectance of the specimen has been estimated from the value of I_S/I_B. Then the estimated reflectance has been put in Fresnel equation relating reflectance and refractive index(RI) to estimate the RI of the material. Measurement has been made for sapphire, germanium, magnesium fluoride, and zinc sulfide. The estimated RI of the materials are closely matching with reference data and the maximum difference less than 2% over the wavelength range 3-5㎛ for all materials tested. As an FT-IR photo-spectrometer with a broadband wavelength infrared light source is used, this method has the advantage of measuring the refractive index at multiple wavelengths in a single measurement.

• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
• /
• v.36 no.3 s.134
• /
• pp.495-505
• /
• 2003

Convective weather systems such as organized mesoscale convective systems (Mesoscale Convective Complex, MCC and Convective Cloud Clusters, CCC) and much weaker Disorganized Short-lived Convection (DSC) in the region of India and Nepal were analyzed using the Meteosat-5 IR imagery. The diurnal march and propagation of patterns of convective activity in the Himalayas and Northern Indian subcontinent were examined. Results indicate that infrared satellite images of Northern India and along the southern flank of the Himalayas reveal a strong presence of convective weather systems during the 1999 and 2000 monsoons, especially in the afternoon and during the night. The typical MCCs have life-times of about 11 hours, and areal extent about $300,000km^2$. Although the core of MCC activity remains generally away from the Middle Himalayan range, the occurrence of heavy precipitation events in this region can be directly linked to MCCs that venture into the Lesser Himalayan region and remain within the region bounded by $25^{\circ}-30^{\circ}N$. One principal feature in the spatial organization of convection is the dichotomy between the Tibetan Plateau and the Northern Indian Plains: CCCs and DSCs begin in the Tibetan Plateau in the mid-afternoon into the evening; while they are most active in the mid-night and early morning in the Gangetic Plains and along the southern facing flanks of the Himalayas. Furthermore, these data are consistent with the daily cycle of rainfall documented for a network of 20 hydrometeorological stations in Central Nepal, which show strong nocturnal peaks of intense rainfall consistent with the close presence of Convective Weather Systems (CWSs) in the Gangetic Plains (Barros et al. 2000).

• The Korean Journal of Quaternary Research
• /
• v.24 no.2
• /
• pp.1-11
• /
• 2010

Energy Balance Model (EBM) was used to experiment the distribution of surface equilibrium temperature which responds to external forcing associated with the surface characteristics. Surface equilibrium temperature is calculated as sum of incoming solar radiation and latitudinal transport is balanced with outgoing infrared radiation. To treat incoming solar radiation, the source of the earth energy, significantly for energy balance, the experiment for surface equilibrium temperature distribution was performed considering the energy balance with the latitudinal albedo change as well as land and sea distribution. In addition, linear albedo change experiment, arctic albedo 5%, 10%, 15% change experiments and the opposite albedo change experiments between arctic and mid-latitudes were performed using incoming solar radiation as an external forcing. Moreover, with and without ice-albedo feedback experiments were performed. Increasing of arctic albedo is blocked out the incoming solar radiation so that it induces decreasing of latitudinal heat transport. It is strengthened energy transport from low latitudes by keeping arctic low energy states. Therefore the temperature change in the mid-latitudes exhibits larger response than that of arctic due to the difference of transport. The land which has lower heat capacity than sea can be reach to equilibrium temperature shortly. Also land is more sensitive to temperature change with respects to albedo. Thus it induces the thermal difference between land and sea. As a result, the equilibrium temperature exhibits differently as the difference of albedo and heat capacity which are the one of surface characteristics. Surface equilibrium temperature decreases as albedo increase and the ratio of temperature change is large as heat capacity is small. The decreasing of surface equilibrium temperature with respects to increasing of linear albedo is accelerated by ice-albedo feedback. However local change of surface equilibrium temperature decreases non-linearly.

• Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
• /
• v.27 no.7
• /
• pp.960-964
• /
• 2014

An experiment was conducted to determine the effects of diets containing coarse-texture rice straw and small particle size alfalfa pellets as a part of total mixed ration (TMR) on milk productivity and chewing activity in lactating dairy cows. Sixteen multiparous Holstein dairy cows ($670{\pm}21kg$ body weight) in mid-lactation ($194.1{\pm}13.6$ days in milk) were randomly assigned to TMR containing 50% of timothy hay (TH) or TMR containing 20% of rice straw and 30% of alfalfa pellet mixture (RSAP). Geometric mean lengths of TH and RSAP were found to be 5.8 and 3.6, respectively. Dry matter intake, milk yield and milk composition were measured. Moreover, eating and ruminating times were recorded continuously using infrared digital camcorders. Milk yield and milk composition were not detected to have significant differences between TH and RSAP. Dry matter intake (DMI) did not significantly differ for cows fed with TH or RSAP. Although particle size of TH was larger than RSAP, eating, ruminating and total chewing time (min/d or min/kg of DMI) on TH and RSAP were similar. Taken together, our results suggest that using a proper amount of coarse-texture rice straw with high value nutritive alfalfa pellets may stimulate chewing activity in dairy cows without decreasing milk yield and composition even though the quantity of rice straw was 40% of TH.